


Solid

by homecriticismchef



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Ficlet, Gen, Waiting, apocalypse and everything after, not quite the afterlife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 09:50:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11964909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homecriticismchef/pseuds/homecriticismchef
Summary: Some sense of ritual, a duty woven in her bones - deeper than any of this half-world’s fragile rules - tells her that what she can do, she must do.





	Solid

She woke to an imagined morning, at the start, so for a while she imagines morning most of the time. She gets everything done early, finally, _for once in her life_ she might say if this were still _life_. Keeps order. Runs her hands over the pews to check for dust that isn’t there, steps to the main doors, then the side entrances in sequence, watching for shadows and listening for sound.

The hardest part is imagining neither, because even the slightest flicker could bring an end to the morning and its soft air of spring; could plunge her into that last real autumn and winter, the endless rain, the stifled sense of siege in the church’s flickering lamplight, the cold and the cries and the miserable ceasing of breath.

In the evenings she thinks, contemplates. She wants to call it prayer, but to have something to pray for she finds she needs names, faces, voices and laughs. Remembering them is too dangerous: the same chill so blissfully absent most of the time runs up her arms and ruffles her collar, not quite a voice itself, visible by proxy like a gale wind whipping through trees: _I can take this church down._

It’s hers to preserve as a haven, she decided so long ago - in the old world, in the lively world - true now as then if not truer, and somehow that sacred memory is the one thing she can remember without branching into destabilizing revelations.

Some sense of ritual, a duty woven in her bones - deeper than any of this half-world’s fragile rules - tells her that what she can do, she must do.

With practice, she imagines seasons and years. Holy days, treats to fuel forgotten celebrations; somehow, songs. Humming. For a moment, once, she imagines the sacristan - her last? One who outlived her herself? - providing her own soundtrack while skimming a record book, the one she’s imagined shut all these years suddenly open - 

The side entrance rattles on its hinges, the sacristan drops to her knees in a feverish parody of devotion - 

The pastor averts her eyes and imagines the book shut, imagines its smooth cover seeping down through the names and dates, imagines most desperately that everyone she knew and tried to protect in that crumbling world has moved on, exists in a better place.

She has doubts about that last, doubts larger than the whole of the space she now inhibits. Too large to fit in her haven, she thinks, and expels them. The church stays solid. So does she.

Some time after that, she forgets even her church’s name; it’s only then that she notices she’s lost her own.

She thinks it began with an A.

**Author's Note:**

> I posted this to tumblr for a womenofssss Friday prompt ... almost a year ago? And meant to put it up here at SOME point. I guess it took the latest update to remind me how much I've been hoping we'll see Pastor A again. The team needs her help! (The team needs all help!)


End file.
